Beloved poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of literature. Oliver meditates on the forces that allowed her to create a life for herself out of work and love.

In this candid look at our relationships with our mothers, fifteen authors write about subjects that they wish they had talked to their mothers about. While some of the writers in this book are estranged from their mothers, others are extremely close. Topics vary widely: from growing up with a deaf mother, to seeking a conversation that won't be interrupted, to relationships affected by the mother's abusive partner. At times humorous, at times tragic,...

Shayla Lawson is major. She is on a mission to move black girls like herself from best-supporting actress to a starring role in the major narrative. Whether she's taking on workplace microaggressions or upending racist stereotypes about her home state of Kentucky, she looks for the side of the story that isn't always told, the places where the voices of black girls haven't been heard. The essays herein ask questions like: Why are black women invisible...

"A collection of essays in which the author discusses the small and large things that delight him"--

"CJ Hauser expands on her viral essay sensation, "The Crane Wife," in a brilliant collection of essays that echo the work of Cheryl Strayed in their revelatory observations of romantic love. CJ Hauser uses her now-beloved title essay as an anchor around which to explore the narratives of romantic love we are taught and which we tell ourselves, and the need to often rewrite those narratives to find an accurate version of ourselves in them. Told with...

Smoke to See By is a collection of 21 essays and stories, many never before published, written by award-winning essayist and columnist Ben Moyer. The collection tracks the writer’s quest for intimate knowledge of, and personal connection to, the natural features of his home region, the foothills and ridges of Northern Appalachia. Readers will follow Moyer along mountain streams and through native woodlands to insightful encounters with rare salamanders,...

"A compilation of pieces about literature--age-old classics as well as his own--that presents a unique look into his literary origins and influences, the books that shaped his taste and formed his ideas about writing and reading"--

""Love is our only hope," Anne Lamott writes in this perceptive new book. "It is not always the easiest choice, but it is always the right one, the noble path, the way home to safety, no matter how bleak the future looks." In Somehow: Thoughts on Love, Lamott explores the transformative power that love has in our lives: how it surprises us, forces us to confront uncomfortable truths, reminds us of our humanity, and guides us forward. "Love just won't...

Why do we remember the past and not the future? What does it mean for time to "flow"? Do we exist in time or does time exist in us? In lyric, accessible prose, Carlo Rovelli invites us to consider questions about the nature of time that continue to puzzle physicists and philosophers alike.

"Charlayne Hunter-Gault is an eminent Dean of American journalism, a vital voice whose work chronicled the civil rights movement and so much of what has transpired since then. My People is the definitive collection of her reportage and commentary. Spanning datelines in the American South, South Africa and points scattered in between, her work constitutes a history of our time as rendered by the pen of a singular and indispensable black woman journalist....